Novel Effect Induced by Spacetime Curvature in Quantum Hydrodynamics

Abstract

The interplay between quantum fluctuation and spacetime curvature is shown to induce an additional quantum-curvature (QC) term in the energy-momentum tensor of fluid using the generalized framework of the stochastic variational method (SVM). The QC term is necessary to satisfy the momentum conservation but the corresponding quantum hydrodynamics is not necessarily cast into the form of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation, differently from the case of the Euclidean spacetime. This seems to suggest that the existence of the Hilbert space is not a priori requirement in the quantization of curved spacetime systems. As an example, we apply the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) metric and show that this effect contributes to the cosmological acceleration although it is too small in the present non-relativistic toy model.